Under the terms of the agreement of sale, there was no contractual provision about covering its losses arising from any calamity. Further, remarkably for these obsessively risk-averse multinational companies, no disaster insurance cover had been taken fo r any such eventuality; in fact, the company claims that it was in the process of taking out insurance on its infrastructure when the cyclone struck. Since it had clearly been inefficient in insuring itself in time, it would choose instead to make its cu stomers - including some of the poorest people in the world living through a major catastrophe - pay for its lapse.
 
Even if we set aside the inevitable knee-jerk reaction that this is likely to evoke in terms of the perfidious behaviour of MNCs, there are some important issues that arise in this context. The first issue relates to the whole pattern of privatisation of the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity that has accelerated in many States in recent times. Many observers have noted that in several States this process has been characterised by a piecemeal approach, vagueness, secrecy and lack o f transparency in the legal follow-through, and a tremendous lack of public participation and therefore of democratic accountability in the final institutional framework that has resulted.
 
The haste to privatise came from a perception that public sector companies were unable to deliver not only because of bureaucratic interference but also because they could not be professional in their approach in terms of efficient provision and recovery of costs. But the pattern that now seems to be followed in many cases in this sector is that private investors (usually multinational investors) will pick up all the profits (in some cases, even guaranteed profits) while the government exchequer bears a ll the risks. So taxpayers end up funding losses even though the essential idea inherent in private entrepreneurship is that profits are rewards for risk-bearing.
 
It is now apparent that another source of trouble in dealing with natural monopolies such as electricity provision is that when the private sector is given control then monopolistic practices are also much more likely. In such circumstances, at the very minimum, the regulatory devices need to be very carefully specified and comprehensive. But this is clearly not so yet in India.
 
The current experience in Orissa illustrates one way in which this can become extremely problematic. In this case, the people of the State, especially in the coastal region, seem to have lost out because of the electricity companys attempt to make them p ay for a major natural calamity which has already caused them huge dispossession. The State Government has lost out because it does not get the advantage of revenues even as it is forced to take on losses if it does not want consumers to be charged more. It is difficult to understand, therefore, why the entire process was necessary at all.
 
The entire privatisation process has been sold to the country on the argument that this would help the government get out of things that the private sector can do better so that the government can concentrate on what the private sector will not do. This episode shows that like so much else in the language of liberalisers and of globalisation, there are poignant gaps both in language and its interpretation in reality, which can be appropriated by those in power.
 
Perhaps this is why Union Power Minister P. Rangarajan Kumarama-ngalam, talking about power and the Orissa cyclone in a conference involving the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission and the United States Energy Association on November 2 (Business Line, November 3) could offer no more wisdom than that the Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission and the privatised distribution and generation companies "will have a challenging task ahead of them in the reconstruction of the State with a human face".
 
That statement was made before Bakkes made his comments quoted above. If the past and present practice of post-liberalisation governments is any indication, it is possible to predict that the face of the present BJP-led Government will be much more "huma n" to multinationals than it is towards those Indians who happen to find themselves in a crisis as in Orissa.